Wednesday, February 26, 2014

like drooling dogs who catch a far-off pitchand hunt it down, through briars, maze and ditch—down to the gameless grounds of cold regretwhere old men brood in self-creating sorrow,stroking their lost potential like a pet.All that they thought were gifts are just a borrow;they see the prize but can no longer buy it,their doggéd lives made paltry and defraudedof promise by the promise of repletionwhich they pursued, bedevilled and be-goddedby deeds and signs, to dubious completion—inheriting not
power, peace and quietbut just the
ruins of their parents' riot.

When we are young, we hear the words of life,

their meaning meant for us and us alonelike sleeping beauties meant to be a wife—like street signs in the Land of Do-As-You-Pleasewhere every road ends with a thrill or a throneand not the taunting of a final teaseof love unending, for the aim is knownand sleep brings only dreams of love and shame,or the dark nightmare of the one-and-onlythat leads down to the hell of might-have-beenwhere we will wake, more castaway than lonely,needing to find a devil for our sin,looking for
something that can take the blamefor why we never
lived up to our name.

When we are young, we translate all we hear—

the names of streets, the words behind deep glances—into a language free of loss and fearand full of something more like verbal chancesthan definitions, flexible to nudge,and not a sentence spoken by a judge.Everything has ten meanings, and we playas if the winning move is always nearand always will be, like a hunting dogwho tracks our kill and never runs awayuntil one day it leaves us in a fogwhere words fail us, and we end the hard dayhumming the tune
of a forgotten song,sitting and
drinking, wondering what went wrong.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

While there are a ton of books about William Shakespeare, books about Marlowe are few and far between, never mind plays or films about him.(You can get a complete list of recent works here.) For non-fiction, there's nothing better than The Reckoning (Charles Nicoll), which has a dizzying amount of detail on Marlowe's espionage connections. I don't know if I agree with Nicoll's theory as to why Marlowe was killed, but he sure provides a ton of evidence that something shady was behind the murder. For something a great deal less conspiratorial, there's Kind Kit (Ross Williamson) and The World Of Christopher Marlowe (David Riggs). In the fiction aisle, I'd recommend A Dead Man In Deptford (Anthony Burgess) and Entered From The Sun (George Garrett). Tamburlaine Must Die (Louise Welsh) is pretty good, while The Marlowe Papers (Ros Butler) is pretty bad, not least because it's entirely written in blank verse which ranges from serviceable to stultifying. The Elizabeth Bear fantasies are fun, as is The Armor of Light (Melissa Scott & Lisa Barnett). The Herbert Lom novel is a little thin, even for a prose version of a screenplay, and Rodney Bolt's History Play is full of so many scholarly and literary in-jokes that it's both delightful and insane.

Marlowe shows up for about five minutes in
Shakespeare In Love, where he’s embodied so well by Rupert Everett that you wish
somebody had greenlit a full-length Marlowe pic for him. He shows up for considerably longer in Anonymous, where he's played by Trystan Gravelle and, before he's killed, manages to watch performances of Henry V, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night, which is kind of like making a movie about Orson Welles in which he gets to watch American Hustle before he dies.
And as for the stage, there was a Broadway rock opera about Marlowe in
1981, which ran for about a month . . .

. . . and a Public Theatre
play about him around the turn of the century.

That one I saw. Here’s my (poetic) review:

KIT MARLOWE

at the Joseph Papp
Public Theatre, 11/11/00

1

The play's first words, said by a whining runt,

are "I am the world's biggest (rhymes with punt)!"Ten seconds later, naked as a grape,the title character swings like an apefrom stage left to stage right, more pale than pink,displaying washboard abs above his dink."I'm so sorry already," whispers Kaytwo minutes into this atrocious play.I nod.If Marlowe
wrote this bad, he'd bedeservedly ignored by history --no poetry, no glory and no senseof what it means to give direct offenseto piety with Faustus or to kingswith Tamburlane and Edward.Nothing sings;lines limp (as Marlowe did, they say) or worsetheir blandness puts the blank into blank verse.No high astounding terms to stun the age --just infinite blather on a little stageabout a man whose verse was writ in flame,a man who made the rules that made the game,a poet who in every five-beat linewrote nothing less than something rich and fine.Just like a jeweler flakes away the chips,so he from prose carved diamonds for lips,mouth-filling jewels -- but none of them are here;just coal and ashes, which deserves a tearor two from those who love a verbal kissor think that he deserves better than this.Direction (Brian Kulick) was the sameas all the rest I've seen by him -- a gameof sliding panels, moving forth and backto mark a scene change, and disguise the lackof thought behind the rest of what we see --a trick that he falls back on constantly.Panels are what he does, and does to death --the staleness of a once-original breath.Stale is the word here, like two-week-old chips.(Is this the lunch that's faced a thousand lips?)The actor playing Marlowe rides his linesso fast that he got 19 speeding fines.The old man playing Walsingham did gawpand cock his head each time he spoke the slopthe playwright fed him, just to demonstratethe foulness of his portion as he ate.The whining runt, Tom Walsingham, is Kit'syoung lover--he speaks in long whining fitsof jealousy and ranting about lifewhile being forced to wed a noble wife.The rest -- an Essex more fop than a man,a Raleigh duller than a faded tanwho feeds Marlowe a wicked spliv of hemp --have all the depth of Larry, Moe and Shemp.It makes me wonder how, under the sun,a steaming piece of crap like this gets done?Do they go nose it out, like hungry flies?Do they seek out dreck that confounds the wise?Alas, they must to their own name be true:The Papp -- it's who we are; it's what we do.

2

What is it about playwrights writing plays

about the theatre?Every time they do,you see the same old cliches: pompous fartspretending to be actors, with their tastedown in their toenails; questions ofidentity a six-year-old could answer --and not a bit of knowledge of how the stageworks, as if they're strangers in the countrythat gave them birth--as if they must make funof what they love to be loved by the masses.You'd think these writers never saw a stageor never liked an actor, and if playslike this are any indication, theycan only write a cipher, whose sole reasonfor living is to spout an argumentmore suited to the study than the theatreor drag a gate from stage right to stage leftlike a good supernumerary sport.At least when God wrote us, he made us freeto spout our own drivel, and not repeathis rantings, if we so choose or desire.And when God made Marlowe, he used both hands,unlike these so-called writers, who think thatquoting the title of a Harry Levin book(The Overreacher) and yet never showingus any overreaching, makes him real.If I had time, I'd sing Marlowe myself,not that I know him any better thanthe next man, but that I think I could writea play where you might nod your heads and say,so this is he whose brief words Shakespeare echoed all his long life, the man who single-handedinvented what we think of as high dramaand from poor speech created a pure linethat was to sing much better in the throatsof his betters, but still sings outas clear as when he first put quill to paper.Not a bad legacy for a man to have,even if he must die just short of thirtyknifed in the eye because of God knows whatconspiracy or bar brawl.Not at alla bad end when you leave behind great words;but bad indeed when so much is unsung,and it’s your fate to be the ghost who hauntsyour followers, as both a lost soul anda guide, like Virgil to young lovesick Dante,showing them hell but barred forever fromthe summit of the sunlit stage of Heaven.

3

From Shakespeare’s
dream book

August 11, 1601

No man has yet
or ever will produce the play I had in mind when first I faced blank
paper.

Marlowe said
that.Christopher Marlowe.Machiavelli to the scabbled world, but Kit,
kind Kit, plain Kit, cold Kit, Kit the vision, Kit the rake, Kit the hedonist,
hyperpobolist, diabolist, delusionist; Kit the father, Kit the son, Kit the
litany hypocritical--firebrand Kit, the flaming Icarus of sunny London, shy Kit
Marlowe to his friends.Not that he
cared for friendship--the flirt friendship, he called her--swoon at the flirt
friendship but once, he'd say, and ever after she's a slut with airs, courted
in competition like Helen of Troy to sneak off finally with a fair-faced
stranger.Marlowe was never so jilted;
Marlowe wooed Marlowe, like a man far gone from want of the wench.His muse red flame and air, burning and
breathing, feeding the very fire that burned itself.

Christopher
Marlowe.The poet of the pure, unbroken
line.Fame's ticing dainty at
twenty-five, worm's meat at thirty.The
man pissed ink as soon as ever he was born.Died in a puddle of it.Black
and unreadable.Marlowe.He said of me once in my own hearing that if
I was given the choice between dreaming and waking, I would choose to dream
that I was awake.Clever man.He said of me also in the hearing of tiny
Tom Nashe, who was never happier than when he was violating a vow of secrecy, a
gleeful imp with the ears of a changeling and a bee-sting for a tongue; Marlowe
was in The Anchor Pub one night, with the three Toms, Tom Nashe, Tom Watson and
Tom Kyd, and a few other companions besides, perhaps even the same ones who
were with him on the last night of his life, the night he died; and they were
all passing drunken judgment on everyone who was not in the room, which is an
old theatrical custom, and someone asked Marlowe, and what do you think of
sweet Will Shakespeare then, and Marlowe said, the man's a prick, and so am I;
but whilst I've been pricking out couplets, sweet Will's been pricking
twins.And who's to say, said Marlowe,
who's to say, which issue of these pricks will outlive the other.My couplets, or his twins?My twins.Hamnet and Judith.Judith the
tiny mirror of her mother; Hamnet my little son.Forever my little son.Dead now these five years.

I dreamed of
him again, last night, Kit Marlowe.In
this dream, I am walking Tinker's Lane in Stratford, on a bright sunny summer
afternoon, and round a corner comes young Marlowe, dead."Will!" he cries as he catches my
eye.And then as I look at him he says,
"Now why do you look at me like that?""Well," says I, staring at my shoes, "the fact is,
that is, well; you're dead, y'know.""Ah well,"says
Marlowe, "you know how it is.Sometimes I forget."

I look off to
one side.Spread my hands.Look to the ground.And stare at Marlowe's shoes.Why is it I can never meet this poet's
eyes?Not once in all the times we've
met--outside the Rose; in a Lord's manor, with shining wood and candles around
us, and the flicker of firelight on the long fingers of his pale hands--"I
have the Queen's hands," he says with a smirk, and displays them
regally--not once have I looked up at him and met his eyes and smiled.Instead the man has always smiled at me,
with the brash bright grin of my brother Edmund, when he asked me for a
player's spot among the Men.The grin
of one who has no power here, who hands his helpless self into the will of
another.A trusting smile.A boy's smile.

"You look
disturbed," says Marlowe."You must be thinking of your Stratford wife."And then he quotes himself, from his play
THE MAID'S COMEDY, the one Sir Edmund Tilney censored and suppressed after one
performance; he quotes himself and says: "Never put faith in things you
cannot trust: Time brings them all, like chimney sweeps, to dust."Time brings them all, like chimney sweeps,
to dust.The words fill me with a
curious sweetness, like the perfume of temptation.

I raise my head and force myself to look
at Marlowe, avoiding his eyes with all the skill of a born liar avoiding the
truth."Well, Kit," says I,
"you look quite debonair for a man who's spent a decade decaying in a
shallow grave.""Decade
decaying," says Marlowe, "oh Will, Will, if I were alive a phrase
like that would kill me."He
laughs and shakes his head, dead Kit Marlowe, laughing and talking despite the
broken line of his life.It baffles me
that a corpse can quit its grave so casually, but I have learned long ago that
in England there is no accounting for taste.

So we fall in
with each other, Marlowe and I, strolling down Tinker's Lane.As in many of my dreams, the scene once set,
the backdrop disappears, so that there is no setting; only two men, heads down,
walking side by side, with yet a distance between them."The mind of man swims a wild, strange
river," Marlowe says as we stroll along."A leaky boat in which one day we find ourselves, and call it
home.And if ever we know the art of
freeing ourselves from it, why, contentment and laziness soon please us to ride
the river, and forget all but the fiery, fleeting, pleasure of the flesh."I nod at this, and see in my mind the
boatman Peter Tuppence, who has ferried me ah, many the time from London town
proper to the Bankside.Beside me in
the boat is Marlowe, eyes wide, unblinking, as we swoop down and under London
Bridge.Why does this man fear water
so?He swam enough at Cambridge.Black gowns on river bank, pale bodies
splashing.The thin shell we ride
lurches down; shadowed now the rush of water, spray on our faces, the clawing
of his hand on my shoulder.His voice
calm as he talks of boys and tobacco, but under his voice I hear the
words:"He speaks to find his
courage in the noise," the words whispered in my ear, as always, in a
boy's voice.We are riding the river
past huge cliffs; atop them castles spire up into the clouds."A paltry thing to trust, the
mind," says Marlowe."Because
of it we know no more than that we woke one day into our separate bodies
envenomed with life; and found, in sickness, such a soothing warmth, that we
soon lost the trick of getting well.And yet there are sweet moments when the trick is there at hand, when
all I've done in this odd body's but a strange and fearful dream, and when I
wake all ties to it will end."

"And like all dreams," I say to him, "you soon discover that, when you try to put your vision into words, there is a spell about
beauty, a magic spell that prevents you from communicating anything deeper than the surface of its ocean; so
that there hovers, in your restless head one thought, one grace, one wonder at
the least, which into words no virtue can digest."Marlowe's words, leaping as easily to the
tongue as fish to the baited hook.

My dead
companion favors me with a smile.Teeth
crooked, black.In his hands is a
freshly-plucked daisy.He pinwheels it."The words of youth," Marlowe
replies."I too was young
once.I thought that I could flout the
doom of using words, so I strutted to and fro in the earth with my eyes screwed
shut, complaining that the world was not worth seeing, that the world within my
mind was worthier of my allegiance.Only thus may boys live out their youthful lives with their coltish
dreams unshattered, free of the doubtfulness and discontent of manhood, and
make some mark upon the tables of time.And that story has but one ending, however it is told."

Slowly he turns
to me.In his hands is an object all in
flames.He holds it out to me.I turn my head.I wave the gift away, as one who in his
sleep shoulders away some fearful dream.And then he smiles, and then I groan, because it is my own heart that I
have thus refused.And sadly then does
Marlowe eat up my burning heart, until there is no part of it left anywhere,
and sadly does he say:"From far
away I come to grant you a life, only to steal it back again for my own
service.Helpless and unsettled are you
now by my will; through me and mine alone will you ever after find comfort, for
in me and mine alone will you fulfill your promise, and yearn with me for
treasures we will always feel the lack of.So will this make of your daily life forever after nothing but a foil,
and a hindrance, and a dark dream from which is no true waking."

He stands in front of a low
hill.Behind him, in the bright green
bushes, a dark door opens wide, a door that reveals a torchlit tunnel which leads
down into the hill, down into darkness.“But if you would wake,” says Marlowe, “truly wake, then come live with
me. Come live with me and be my love,”
he says.And the dark door beckons, and
Marlowe grins, and I awake in my London bed to the distant echo of a dying roll
of thunder in the dark.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

That translates as “What nourishes me, destroys me.” It’s the inscription on this portrait, discovered in 1952 in Corpus Christi College. It’s of the other guy besides Shakespeare who’s celebrating a 450th birthday this year: Christopher Marlowe.

Like
Shakespeare, Marlowe's actual birth date is not known; but since he was christened on
the 26th of February, exactly two months before Shakespeare’s christening—and since
Shakespeare’s birthday is commonly assumed to have taken place 3 days before
his own christening—it’s consistent to assume that Marlowe was born on the 23rd
of the month as well.And like Shakespeare, we do know the actual date of Marlowe's death: May 30, 1593, when he was barely 29 years old. Officially, he was killed by a knife thrust into his eye during a tavern brawl in Deptford. I say "officially" because the other three men involved in the brawl, as well as Marlowe himself, have definite connections to the spying circle that is part of the hell of the Elizabethan underworld, and at the time of his death, Marlowe was under suspicion by the Privy Council of (among other things) writing a libelous poem against illegal aliens and signing it "Tamberlane." All of which became known less than a hundred years ago, when Leslie Hotson hunted down and found a copy of the pardon which had been given to Marlowe's killer a month after the murder.There are some who think that Marlowe faked his death and then went on to write most of Shakespeare's plays between 1594 and 1616. To my mind, all you have to do to refute this argument is to read any one of Marlowe's plays. They're beautiful poetry, in some cases even more beautiful than the best of Shakespeare, but you can sift through all of them and find precious little evidence that Marlowe ever had or overheard an actual conversation with a living breathing human being, never mind showed any interest in how they felt or what made them tick.

Which is not to say that there aren't a ton of Marlowe echoes throughout Shakespeare (especially in As You Like It, which I'll go into in another post). The portrait inscription above, for instance, is echoed in two places in Shakespeare: Sonnet 73
(“consumed with that which it was nourished by") and Pericles (“Quod me
alit, me extinguit"). It's entirely possible to use these echoes as evidence that the same man wrote all three lines; me, I prefer to think of it as one man haunted by the ghost of another for his entire writing and acting career. Why? Because Marlowe's deceptively simple iambic pentameters pretty much created Elizabethan theatre as we know it. If Shakespeare is the era's Beatles, then Marlowe is its Elvis. With the sad corollary that most of what he did either got censored or corrupted or lost along the way (the subject of yet another upcoming post).The simplest way to think of Marlowe's effect on the playmakers of the day? What he did went viral. Everybody imitated him. Everybody echoed him. But nobody really equaled him. Not even Shakespeare, who saddled the horse that Marlowe reared and rode it off into an entirely unexpected direction.

An example of Marlowe going viral? In 1599, a poem he wrote God knows when (before 1593, unless you think he was still alive 6 years after his official death) was published in a collection called The Passionate Pilgrim. Everybody went nuts over it, so much so that when it was reprinted a year later in a collection called England's Helicon, it was followed by an answer poem written by Sir Walter Raleigh. (After which John Donne wrote his own version.) Here they all three are.

The Passionate
Shepherd to His Love

by Christopher
Marlowe

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, hills, and fields Woods or steepy mountain yields

And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks By shallow rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flower, and a kirtle Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty lambs we pull; Fair lined slippers for the cold With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,

With coral clasps and amber studs; And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May morning: If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me and be my love.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

You
only have to watch about 20 minutes of Inside Llewyn Davis to understand why it
got passed over for every Academy Award nomination except cinematography and sound
mixing.It looks and sounds great.The problem is, all these good-looking
people sound like dicks. You
wouldn’t know that from reading most of the reviews, which say that it’s bleak
but tender.Which is only true if you
include the music; take the songs away, and the tender goes with it.

Story-wise, it’s widely assumed, and continually repeated, that
the events in the film are based on the life and early career of Dave Van Ronk,
one of the great pre-Dylan Village folkies.They are and they aren’t—there are enough similarities to make the
comparison, but the essentials are so different that it’s like listening to a
cover version that sounds so little like the original that it becomes a
different song entirely, like The Pretenders doing “Stop Your Sobbing” or
Sinead O’Connor doing “Nothing Compares To You.” From what little I know of Van
Ronk, on the worst day in his life he was nowhere near the total jerk Llewyn
Davis is for most of this movie.

See the cat?

But then everybody’s a jerk in this movie, which takes place
in a 1961 that is populated by assholes, womanizers, bitter women who are dumb
enough to sleep with womanizers, struggling musicians, uncomprehending
relatives, silly intellectuals, and producers who don’t know a good thing when
they see it, but sure do know one when they can make money from it.Structurally, it’s a song where the verses
finally catch up to the refrain, sort of like “Rocket Man” by Pearls Before
Swine, where the chorus is only understood after the final verse tells you why
it has to be what it is.

Thematically, it’s about how talent alone just isn’t good enough.You can be a talented as hell, but if you
don’t have something more—luck, a presence, the goodwill of an audience—you will
never make it to the next level, the level where there’s money in it.And truth be told, the movie also,
subversively, makes the totally opposite case:the reason why talent isn’t good enough is because you need something
less, not something more—something that the untalented can recognize in
themselves; something middle of the road.There’s a scene in the Gaslight where Davis watches an audience sing
along to a performance, and the look on his face tells you exactly why no one
will ever sing along with him. And yet when one character does, a little later in the movie, he goes ballistic.

And given that this is also a movie about failure—failure to
get that lucky break, failure to take that highway exit to Akron, failure to
make the right choice between royalties and a cash payout, failure to treat
women like people, failure to know what you want, failure to live up to other
people’s expectations, failure to live up to your own talent—this is a hard
movie to like. Especially since most of those failures are committed by the main character. If the Coen Brothers wanted me to reach into the movie and beat some sense into Llewyn Davis, then they succeeded.

I
also couldn’t help noticing that the only women in this movie are an angel who
curses like a merchant marine, a moralistic shrew who is blamed by her brother
for doing exactly what he tells her to do (and she still comes off looking
guilty), the wife of a professor who is reduced to tears by someone she thought
was her friend, and an out-of-town singer who is heckled by a drunken
self-loathing lout. So if the Coens wanted me to storm into their office and bitch slap the pair of them until they write three-dimensional females, then they succeeded there as well.

But the real success here? The music, which redeems every
unforgivable action in the film.It's
everything the rest of the movie isn’t, and the best song in the film (go
figure) is a three-minute novelty number about astronauts that is performed and
directed so perfectly that it will make you giddy with delight.In fact, just listening to the soundtrack
will give you a completely different vision of this film.On the basis of its music alone, Inside
Llewyn Davis is about a vibrant, hopeful, emotionally-charged era which is
reaching back into the past in order to make sense of the present.
No bleak; all tender.All jewels.But when it
comes to the film itself, it's like seeing those jewels in a setting that takes
away their value.There’s a case to be
made that this, too, is intentional—that the contrast between inside and
outside, the difference between creators and their creations, is the main thing
that this movie is about.But like the
movie’s hero, it’s lacking that certain something which would add up to
success.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

“Only connect,” said EM Forster in Howards End.One wonders what he would make of the
internet--which has redefined the words “connection” and “social”--never mind a
movie like Her, which is about how those two words are (and aren’t) fulfilling.At least that’s what it was about for me,
while I was watching it; and I submit that it’s a good enough film that you can
read a number of themes into it.The
problem is, you can also dismiss it entirely as something so male-centric that
only half the audience will want to read it at all; the other half has seen it
far too often in real life to be entertained by it.

My initial reaction?Two sweet for satire, too low-key for laughter, too bittersweet to be a
tragedy, this is a film about a guy who falls in love with an OS, the
artificial intelligence behind his new Operating System, and it’s set in a
world where heartfelt letters can only be written by corporate employees who
are so uncomfortable in their own skins that they can only express their feelings
behind a mask.(Insert your best
Facebook analogy here.)

At heart, it’s a magic techno fairy tale, in which the
digital object of the main character’s affection exists primarily to ask (and
embody) the question: when even inanimate objects can get a life, why can’t
you?

And like all fairy tales, the moment you start asking
realistic questions, it starts to unravel, in this case into a yarn that’s
acombination of social commentary and
love story.It’s about the way people
look for connections with and through inanimate objects in our culture, and the
way, in every couple, there’s always one who wants to move and one who wants to
stay put.If love is a houseboat, then
one partner is always catching some rays on deck while the other is in the wheelhouse
checking out charts and maps.And while
it isn’t always the men with tans and the women with maps, it’s a cliché for a
reason. In this story, the artificial intelligence grows by leaps and bounds, until she's creating maps her male partner can't even read, and going places he can't ever follow. (Y'know, like most women.)

There’s also a third thing going on here—and I don’t know if
it was intentional on the writer/director’s part, or simply a side-effect of
the story he’s telling.It’s about how,
to a certain type of male, a relationship with an inanimate object takes
precedence over a relationship with a real person.Through most of the movie, the premise—a guy starts dating his
new Operating System—is presented and accepted as a person-to-person
relationship, even though one of those people is an artificial
intelligence.The only person who
questions this—the guy’s ex-wife—is written and directed to act like a
party-pooper, somebody who just doesn’t get it.And there’s the problem, because I’m betting a lot of women in
the audience agree with her when she makes a crack about her ex-husband dating
his laptop.Because, let’s face it,
what woman in her right mind wants to pay money to watch a guy who loves to
interact with his computer rather than have a conversation with a real person?
It’s bad enough the straight ones have to date people like this.And speaking of which: the two actual
physical dates in the film nail this type of guy perfectly—the surrogate date
(okay; that would be weird as hell for anybody) and the date where the guy is
so warm and approachable and then at the end he pulls back a couple of hundred
miles, pecks you on the cheek, and says “Keep in touch,” and you’re like “What
the fuck just happened here?”

On the plus side, it’s one of the few romantic comedies
where the man gets educated instead of the woman.(I’m trying to think of other examples besides High
Fidelity and I’m drawing a blank.Help me out here, people.)But
it’s not really a romantic comedy, is it?It’s the story of someone who is lifted up from the digital gutter and
becomes so changed when she’s exposed to a life she didn’t know that she cannot
go back and cannot remain where she is—she has to move forward.It’s Shaw’s Pygmalion (NOT My
Fair Lady) with the words “Mary Freddy?” replaced by “Talk philosophy
with Alan Watts?”And for those of you
who may not know who Watts is, he’s the man who wrote this in What Is
Wrong With Our Culture:

For the vast majority of American families, what
seems to be the real point of life—what you rush home to get to—is to watch an
electronic reproduction of life … this purely passive contemplation of a
twittering screen.

Did Spike Jonze know this quote when he included Watts as a
character in the film?My money’s on
yes.Does the mood of the film have a Lost
In Translation feel to it because Sofia Coppola and Jonze are
divorced?More money on yes.And was it revenge voice-over (which is the
filmic version of revenge sex) to replace Samantha Morton with the female star
of Lost In Translation?It’s a side bet, but for my money, it’s a probable twelve to seven.Mark my words: when Film Forum gets around
to it, they‘re going to put these two movies on a double bill, and people are
going to smack their foreheads and say: “Crap—which one is the answer film
again?”

In the lead role, Joaquin Phoenix gives one of those acting
performances that’s so good he’ll never get an award for it.He just embodies everything that makes this
guy exactly the kind of person who would equate opening up to another person
with revealing his inner self to a talking iPhone.He’s like Woody Allen without any of the passive-aggressive
lashing out that Allen uses in his jokes.In Phoenix, all the lashing is in.I totally buy it.

**What I don’t buy is that the Amy Adams character is having a
“relationship” with her own (male) OS.The only time we see them interact is when they’re goofing around with
this game that AA is developing, and in that scene, whoever this OS is, he’s
more like her digital gay best friend than somebody she’s going to try to have
surrogate sex with—and no way in hell is he talking to her in Ryan Gosling’s
voice the way Scarlett Johansson is talking to Phoenix.**

Like the concept of the OS itself, this is a movie which you
can either take personally or impersonally.I took it personally, but then it feels like, deliberately or
accidentally, it was made with not just the Y chromosome in mind, but Matt
Wells.And if you don’t know who Matt
Wells is, he’s the guy who said this:

Men love women because they have the idiotic idea that
they’ll stay the same; women love men because they have the naïve hope that
they’ll somehow change.

Call it the Pygmalion story, call it a meditation on Jonze’s
marriage to Coppola, this movie is not about the possibility of love as much as
it about the inevitability of loss, the certainty that what was born yesterday
will outgrow you and move on tomorrow.It’s about shared loneliness.Which is why the final image is right out of L’Avventura.Wide shot of two people next to each other
seen from behind, and the head of one dips to
nestle on the shoulder of the other, like the hand of Monica Vitti softly
stroking the head of Gabriele Ferzetti.

It’s a light touch, in the end, but what it touches on is
something deep and sad and ultimately we’re-all-in-this-together
forgiving, and I'm not sure the film hasn't earned it. Because in the end, it’s not about what happened with Her. It’s about what happens next with those two
people. It’s about Us.** AUTHOR'S EMBARRASSING EDIT: Please ignore everything between these asterisks above. The OS that the Amy Adams character is having a relationship with is a She, not a He, as my friend Amanda pointed out below.